Anyone who is currently or has recently been in school knows that mental health issues have become more severe than ever among students. While there are many well meaning people out there doing their best to try and help with this crisis, the sad truth is that help often does not get to the thousands of students left feeling isolated and alone in their struggles. Our inability to plan and budget to combat mental health issues in our schools quickly leads to crisis points, and we cannot continue to just hope we can get by with last minute crisis-aversion programs, if that. Students should not have to feel like they need to be at a crisis point to get help. They need to know that they are not crazy or alone in their feelings and struggles, that there are people ready and willing to help them, and that those people are willing to fight for and with them every step of the way.

Our goal at the Icarus Research Project is to ultimately create a partnership of students, schools, organizations, and government officials (among others) that both promotes interdisciplinary research on how to best combat the modern mental health and also subsequently pushes for the implementation of relevant programs. Research is useless without implementation, and we will never see this crisis get better until we combat the social stigmas that discourage/prevent mental health treatment. We need to improve education about mental health and create a widespread societal push for the adoption of better support programs, more health-conscious curriculums, and more progress-focused legislations.

The first step toward achieving our goal is gathering our data. We need to cast as wide a net as possible, creating a strong community of individuals with a large collective network all working together and committed to attacking this omnipresent issue. This is where you come in.

We are looking for people high school aged or older that are passionate about this crisis and helping the lives it impacts. Whether you have been personally affected, have had to watch friends and family suffer, or just feel passionate about helping those suffering, we want you as a part of our team. To achieve any of our goals, we first need to gather as much information as we can, in every form from personal testimony and anecdotal stories of struggles, to quantitative data on the rates of different illnesses in different areas/schools, to the gathering of new perspectives about how we can tackle the issues at hand. The more people we have working on this, the more likely we can make an impact for the better.

If you are interesting in applying to be a part of the Icarus Research Group, please fill out the form below. We know more than anyone that times are especially difficult right now, and not everyone can take on a massive new project. Please do not feel like you cannot or should not apply if you don't have much time to give or feel you are "under qualified" (especially as we are still in our infancy, we are not presently requiring any minimum time/work commitment requirements). So long as you are passionate about our goal and want to be a part of the movement for change, we want you!